mg. kit
kit@m.tripulse.link
I found a group of people very passionately talking about how much they hate it when writers base their fictional worlds on the real world, and how horribly lazy they think it is, and how any writer that does that is a loser, and so on and so forth, and all I can think is “okay. so?”
to be clear, I do think truly original worldbuilding is wonderful and I always love to see it. I just don’t understand at all how someone could think of that as the bare minimum when:
A: it’s as difficult as it is even for the most creative of people
B: even the most alien worlds are still always tied to reality one way or another, whether or not the writer intended it
C: the real world is as ridiculous and sometimes unbelievable as it is anyway
and D: there are so many great stories that reality never told, and telling those stories often works best in a world resembling our own
you know what I think is lazy? fiction that’s just straight up in the real world. why would you ever want to write what is essentially fanfiction of reality? are you so uncreative that you can only imagine things when it’s feasible that they could have happened outside your door? and on the other hand, why would you ever want to read this kind of fiction? are you so unimaginative that anything that you don’t immediately recognize and could point to on a map makes your brain short circuit?
I jest, of course. everything I just said sounds ridiculous, right? I think that group I encountered sounded equally ridiculous
though there was a grain of truth there, I personally really don’t enjoy real-world fiction very much. I want things that are new and interesting, but I also appreciate many aspects of the real world, and I think worldbuilding that uses reality as its base of inspiration is a great way to play with that
my own world is (currently) inspired by parts of the real world, and I don’t feel lazy for doing that, I feel that it’s given me many opportunities to learn things about some world history and cultures that I never otherwise would have, because I put a lot of thought into this thing so I could create something unique, believable, and recognizable, all at once. it’s still my world, after all. I built it, I didn’t just take it
I can foresee certain types of people hearing me say this and responding with something about escapism, so I also want to point out that this is specifically not about escapism. if I, or anyone else interested in this type of worldbuilding, wanted pure escapism, we would be writing high fantasy or some such, stuff that’s completely detached from reality (on the surface anyway). I specifically don’t want that though, there are things I want to say and perspectives I want to explore here, in this world, and I don’t think trying to do that in a completely disconnected world would be the same, because that clear, grounded recognizability is part of the message, and it would be missing that way. if the only two acceptable kinds of fiction to you are 100% realism and 100% escapism, then you have a skill issue, writers and readers alike
there’s one thing I can probably agree with that group on though. it is lazy to just copy and paste something from the real world wholesale and change nothing but the name. but that’s not what they were talking about at the time
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eli, vampire kitsune
rowan
@kit as one who often writes their own worlds and spends a lot of time doing so, yeah absolutely agree. especially with point B (though all 3 are spot on) – i want to say it’s almost definitely impossible to create a world that is entirely divorced from reality. even if it were possible, i’m not sure if it would really be that interesting because it’d be so foreign and unrelatable that i’m not sure we could get much out of it as creatives or readers.
and to be honest, i think that one of the best elements of writing an alien world is that it is able to speak about our reality better than a story purely about reality. i once had star trek explained to me as “reframing real world issues in a way that makes them unfamiliar so that it’s easier to gain a new perspective” and i think that’s a powerful tool
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Autism Jo 
🍂
ShadowJonathan@tech.lgbt
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@kit sorry for kinda glossing over the post, but one thing that popped up in my mind after seeing those 4 points is a 5th one; relatability and recognisability is a HUGE factor to get people to read your stories
ime the better blend of a story is one where the relatable or recognisable part is not less than half of the original, new or unrecognisable stuff.
its not able to be quantified, and the "half" is just for the feeling of a measurement, but the core thing is; give people some rope, give them some things they understand, even if they just recognise the world you've helped to build in their minds the last few chapters, since that counts as recognisable too
it helps to anchor and to relate and to orient readers to the story. the author can have immense amounts of original storytelling and creative characters, but you can never get there by just placing them in medias res, and removing all the cues and help to help readers understand wtf is happening
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eli, vampire kitsune
rowanShow content
@ShadowJonathan @kit yeah this is exactly what came to mind for me as well. there’s a point where fun worldbuilding and originality just becomes pure nonsense for nonsense’s sake because it’s completely detached from reality. it’s fun to explore new concepts that you maybe haven’t considered before, but having to make sense of something which is inherently nonsensical is just a chore.
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mg. kit
kit@m.tripulse.link@rowan star trek is a weird one, because I feel like it pretty effectively plays both sides of my thoughts here. it’s very unreal and quite creatively unique, far removed from reality, while also being very recognizable with very clear connections to the real world it was made in at the same time (and I don’t just mean because all the aliens are just humans with funky faces)
I really like that quote though, and I think that idea can be just as, if not potentially more powerful, when applied to the kind of writing I had in mind; the “it looks and sounds and feels like our earth, but everything is a bit different” type of thing
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@kit i've encountered this while planning or talking about stories with friends, i LOVE exotic and unknown things, i love it when they're new, i love transformation stories, seeing characters grip new powers or whatnot from themselves, or see internally consistent systems of magic (or the likes) start to make sense
all of that requires tons of creativity, but i realised (or started thinking) that it is not just that; filler has function, a friend of mine (hi @brie) told me that i should have filler in some/most of my stories to offset and "rest" the changes and exciting stuff that would happen in the other chapters, even if it is just "more of the same"; more of the characters playing and messing around with whatever new thing happened lately, it helps ground and familiarize those things, it helps offset alienation
originality is good, but there's a high risk of alienating readers by things that aren't penetrable, understandable, without footholds
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Autism Jo 🍂
ShadowJonathan@tech.lgbt
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@rowan @kit there is a joy to be had in *leading* a reader to this place, though.
there are many worlds in fantasy and sci-fi nowadays that simply wouldnt exist or be understandable to someone who wouldn't consume media, who wouldn't read a book, and only lives in this physical reality; those worlds exist and are familiar to people because - either in iteration, or by a single author/work/media - they've been led from this physical reality, into that other reality, which then got made familiar to them
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Brie (robot girl)
brie@do.crimes.brie.gayShow content
I suspect I didn’t use the word “filler”, but close enough
stories need some sort of grounding or foothold to avoid becoming extremely difficult to follow/parse, and it’s easy to skip past that as the writer. As a writer, you know the concepts because you have to think things through in order to write them, but that doesn’t mean the readers are going to be able to follow a short summary.
Which directly leads back into the original point about fictional worlds based on the real world: the more unique/new things there are in a fictional world, the more time is required to explain and introduce those ideas.
In Vampire Prey (the one piece of writing I’ve shared publicly), the world and technology isn’t super far from earth, and leans towards established tropes for all of the differences. This wasn’t a specific goal or because I don’t have interesting worldbuilding ideas, it was to try to focus on the core part of the story: two specific characters interacting and the dynamic (and also smut). I could have told the story in a more original universe, but it would inherently be a lengthier story that’s harder for people to get into, which has its own trade offs
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@ShadowJonathan hard agree about filler, that’s so often where my favorite stuff is hiding. I have several stories on the to-write list that could arguably be considered nothing but filler, compared to so many other stories out there. a better word for it is probably “downtime” for these reasons and more
on the other hand, where I’m trying to come from here is the idea that a fictional world could be inspired by reality to the degree that even though the place names and historical events and such are all new and unfamiliar, the cultures and societies and even thought processes of the characters are recognizable enough that a reader would automatically fill in most of the blanks without even realizing it, and without needing explicit worldbuilding or downtime to help them along
with a world like that, stories could easily be written much leaner, but it also makes it much easier to draw a reader into more complex things much earlier. it takes a long time for most people to get familiar enough with a full fantasy world to become receptive to things like local politics or interplay between church and state, for instance, but if they already intuitively understand much of the world, you can just jump right into that, and if you’re so inclined, heavy topics can be made much heavier
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Brie (robot girl)
brie@do.crimes.brie.gay@ShadowJonathan @kit related: sci-fi/fantasy worlds reinventing the calendar.
yes, it’s original to do so, and it’s a bit silly that all of these completely separate worlds would have a 7 day week with a calendar the same as (or similar to) the Gregorian calendar
But consider: why? in almost every case I’ve seen (I’ll admit that there are a few stories that do this well), it ends up taking a lot of words to explain, is confusing to the readers, and it adds absolutely nothing to the story
it usually feels like the author is trying to show me how clever and original they are, and I’m stuck trying to remember how long a day and a week is if I want to be able to parse what’s happening.
a story that did this in a way I liked was a mixed sci-fi/fantasy setting where the MC referred to everything in seconds (e.g., 600 seconds, 2 kiloseconds, etc.). It clearly didn’t require me to know exactly how long things were, just “near future” or “far future”, and it was still easy to do relative positioning of events (1 kilosecond from now is obviously less than 2 kiloseconds from now)
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@brie @ShadowJonathan this is a particularly fun one for me. early on in my worldbuilding, I had originally come up with my own calendar. it had eight months, each with eight weeks of four days, and I thought it was really neat, but then I thought “wait a minute, why are they called months, weeks, and days still” and by the time I got to the point of reinventing time itself, I got bored and decided to just use the gregorian calendar and make a joke out of it by never referring to a month or day by name, only numbers
turns out, it’s way easier to imagine and work within the world you’ve created when you intuitively understand its flow of time already. I wasn’t writing any stories at that time because I was too focused on internal consistency, but as soon as I made that change, stories began to flow again, because I’m evidently not imaginative enough to really get that deep into my ideas and intuit them
I’m still considering alternative systems of time for the future, but after that learning experience, it will only be a change in observance rather than a fundamental change of the whole system. a world where years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes, and seconds are all the same lengths as they are in reality, but the people in that world measure their passage instead by things like seasons, moon phases, or flora and fauna, quite convincingly sells a fantasy while still being intuitive in reality
somewhat related, but I think pretty much the same way for systems of measurement. they’re easier to explain by giving points of reference, but it still creates a little more friction in the writing process than I’m comfortable with, so I just used the metric system, and if anyone asks, I call it localization. the english language doesn’t exist in my world either, yet I write in english after all
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Autism Jo 🍂
ShadowJonathan@tech.lgbt
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@kit not to mention that sci-fi and fantasy is its own fanfiction; much of fantasy and sci-fi is easier to follow and jump into nowadays, because the groundwork for concepts and ideas has been laid by writers and filmmakers decades earlier, and now they live on in the general body of knowledge
you start to see cliches in a world that hasn't existed at all without the fictional works that support and allude to it, which is pretty odd, if you think about it
but i digress :3
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Autism Jo 🍂
ShadowJonathan@tech.lgbt
@kit @brie im hitting this with one story of mine as well; i've developed an internal logic for the world that it takes place into, and due to the nature of it, it means that it (culturally) exists *eons* after current human culture, "in the far future", on another planet
those factors *should* make the use of the Gregorian calendar basically passe; it doesnt make sense as to why a world so far in the future would use such a "relic" of a cultural standard for some of its systems, when it should use much more applicable systems (especially since its a different planet, with different day lengths)
so im either left with; a. "hiding" the use of any calendar, b. only referring to it with instantly-understandable ideas (like "half-years" or something, since a "year" is still basically "1 rotation around the sun"), or c. still using gregorean, and finding a reason why this is the case
its just one of those things lurking in the back of my head, since any one of those options is a compromise
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Brie (robot girl)
brie@do.crimes.brie.gayI think pretty much the same way for systems of measurement
I entirely agree with this, although I think you can get away with it easier for distance.
I don’t actually care about how many kilometers apart two cities are, so reinventing distance is okay
In a fantasy setting, “63 kilometers” is only very slightly more meaningful than “72 scayeds” (I randomly hit buttons on my keyboard)
I actually care about how long it takes to travel, how difficult it is to traverse the terrain, the risks involved, etc.
The city is 72 scayeds away, we’ll be out of food days before we even get close.
is far more informative than
The city is 63 kilometers away, and we only have enough food to last two more days.
even though you get more “absolute” information when kilometers are actually given
I still think it’s fun to think about all of this in worldbuilding and plan that part out, but it’s not important that it goes into the actual story
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Brie (robot girl)
brie@do.crimes.brie.gay@ShadowJonathan @kit your story might be too far for this to quite make sense, but I’ve read sci-fi where characters complain that they still have to use the same stupid calendar that everyone else uses, even though Earth has been uninhabitable for centuries
Nobody ever manages to get everyone to agree on an alternative, so they’re still stuck with this last remnant of language and culture
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